Is Google becoming too dominant?

Google recently announced its acquisition of DoubleClick in a $3 billion deal. Whilst this may open new opportunities for both publishers and advertisers, it has me a little worried.

Google established itself with the mantra ‘Do no evil’ and it is becoming increasingly important that Google stays true to this as it becomes ever more dominant and moves further into offline businesses.

Google is looking to dominate online advertising, this latest acquisition proving that money is no object against their desire for ever increasing market penetration. Is Google becoming overly dominant?

The advantages of Google’s advertising power

Web publishers who may struggle to gain access to the large ad agencies such as DoubleClick may benefit should Google integrate their new agencies into the Google AdSense model. This could be beneficial for publishers as they will find a larger potential pool of advertisers for their site, which should in turn increase their revenue.

The disadvantages of Google’s advertising power

As Google acquires ad agencies, advertisers and publishers alike will find they have reduced choice when it comes to advertising solutions. Basic economics suggests that the less competition there is, the higher the prices without the consequential rise in efficiency or service.

Some of Google’s acquisitions can be seen as immediately beneficial – the introduction of Google Checkout now offers an alternative to PayPal which pretty much ran a monopoly on small payment transfers.

Google’s latest foray however, has me a little worried for the future. It is using is huge financial power to increase its influence in every area of the online and even the offline world.

How do you feel about Google? Do you have any concerns about their increasing dominance, or are you happy with their growth and influence?

They have started out being a simple search engine and “used” other sites for their search listing, got people use to going to their search engine and now they are competing directly with websites that gave them their foundation – hardly fair ?
And as for Yahoo I submitted my site for inclusion with the site description of it being a question and answer forum – 7 months later they bring out Yahoo answers – could be totally unrelated but I have to wonder especially when my site has still not been indexed by Yahoo.

I quite like Google if I’m honest. I only want to get rid of Google Adsense because when someone clicks on their ads they leave your site. Whereas with Paid on Results etc you’re allowed to add the target=”_blank” code.

Gmail – 6gb of free space. They might be becoming dominant, but they do good with the dominance they get. It’s not like they’re being stingy!

What does Microsoft Hotmail give you these days, 10mb after clicking about 500 pages of “no thanks” to all the little check boxes of junk mail they offer you? .. that’s the richest man on earth for you.

Wonder if we’re going to get Google Broadband or a Google operating system next !!

Harry – Google are diversifying and expanding in order to protect their revenue streams. The problem is they have such huge capital and power, they can easily push out competition based on their immense resources. In my opinion, Google is becoming more like Microsoft whilst Microsoft is trying to become more like Google.

Smiley – Google is pretty popular right now as they enjoy great brand value and a positive public perception. I imagine this is how Microsoft started out before they began to abuse their market position. Perhaps I am just being cynical, though?????